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Shane’s ability to speak bird doesn’t end at loon.
He drags Ilya along for a sunrise hike, bribes him outside with the promise of witnessing something incredible. He’s so excited that Ilya can’t bring himself to make the dirty joke he wants to make, even though Shane would probably laugh, but even the miniscule chance of it deflating him is too much of a risk. A couple days in Shane Hollander’s home, and here’s Ilya Rozanov, shying away from risk.
Ilya drags his feet and dramatizes how out of breath he gets from walking uphill to hide the fact that he’s actually a little out of breath. God, Shane would never let him live it down if he found out.
Shane is holding out his cell phone as he walks in the almost dark, instinctively knows where to step in the bush to not lose his balance. He’s wearing a headlamp, the strap Metro colours. Don’t laugh, he’d said when he’d put it on. It gives Ilya a headrush so violent that he has to bite down hard on the inside of his cheeks to ground himself.
“What are you looking at?” Ilya tries to ask but Shane shushes him, holds a finger to his lips like a librarian from a cartoon.
He’s frowning in concentration, taps the screen of his phone as he tilts it to show Ilya. It’s just numbers. He shrugs his little backpack higher up on his shoulder. It’s comically small.
The smaller your bag is, the less likely you are to overpack, Shane had defended himself. We’re only going for an hour and a bit. We just need water and a wilderness first aid kit.
The first aid kit is comically large.
Shane stops to stare at a bush bearing round red fruit. Then he keeps going.
As they’d tucked themselves into bed the other night, when Ilya had admitted to him that this is the longest amount of time he’d ever spent somewhere this remote, Shane had said they should go camping together. Ilya tells him he does not understand the appeal of hauling all of that stuff somewhere to be uncomfortable. Shane says he likes the kind of quiet it gets in a tent up north. It’s different from the cottage, Shane explains. Here it’s kind of like being underwater, but up there it feels like sticking your head into a cloud. He gets embarrassed. I don’t know. Shane and his preferred types of quiet. God, Ilya could just eat him alive.
Finally, they seem to reach the spot that looks the same as the rest of the forest that Shane has been so determined to reach, he turns around to look at Ilya with a wide toothy grin, palm covering the light strapped to his forehead. He turns it off and then reaches out for Ilya’s hand.
Ilya takes it. Their cold fingers interlock.
He hears a bird sing, and then some others. Something moves in the branches of the tree above them. When Ilya startles, Shane turns his body to place his other hand on Ilya’s shoulder, cheek pressed to his bicep.
“Warblers,” Shane whispers to him.
Another dozen or something birds join in, and then what seems like another thousand. A crescendo of sound. The trees rustle even though the wind is still. He can hear wingbeats and birdsong and if he listens very closely, Shane exhaling with his mouth. He turns his head to watch the condensation billow, steam from a ship.
The birds sing louder and louder, and then start to all at once. The stillness makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Shane lets go of his hand and his shoulder. They turn to look at each other. Ilya stares at the little strands of hair that come down to kiss Shane’s forehead, the dotting against the tan of his skin, the pink of his mouth and tips of his ears. For a second, Ilya forgets their circumstances, bends into a reality where he is an animal too. He wants to watch Shane smile and sink his teeth into the fat of his cheeks, watch the indentation undo itself. Do it again and again and again.
Shane hands come up to his own mouth, similar posturing to that night he’d called back to the loon, and he makes a chirping sound. Sweet and sharp and short, into the silence of the woods. Like a stone skipping across the water.
The birds sing back, or at least that’s how Ilya sees it. Shane makes the same sound, but slower now, and then the birds sing back louder. Ilya reaches out to catch his hands as they drop, and he squeezes them tight, watches as Shane’s lips fold into a smile.
I hate you, Ilya mouths, but he feels his eyes go big and his shoulders tremble. He raises Shane’s hands up to his own cheeks and presses, watches the freckles fold into themselves, as the skin bends, and God, Ilya feels like a wild animal. He wants to wrap around Shane and envelope Shane completely and tuck himself under Shane’s arm. Do it again, he mouths.
Just once, it looks like Shane is mouthing as Ilya lets go of his hands. He mouths something else, a longer sentence, but Ilya can’t make out what he’s saying.
Shane holds out his palms around where the air escapes the bird noise making the shape of his hands, the way people warm themselves around a fire. This must be why Shane doesn’t feel inclined to drink or smoke or anything, if he’s doing things like this all the time. The blood rush to Ilya’s head feels magnificent. Maybe it’s the outdoors. Maybe it’s who he’s with. Regardless, he can never be up this early again, lest he get addicted. A sacrifice he will have to make.
Shane makes the same sound he did the first time, but repeats it twice. The birds call back to him, fewer this time as the sun takes its position into the sky. Ilya stares at him, stares and stares and stares. Lets his eyes drink their fill. What is he meant to do about any of this?
“I was saying that you shouldn’t do too many bird calls in the early morning,” Shane finally speaks, albeit quietly. “Because it’s their mating season, and it can confuse them.”
“Mating call,” Ilya says back, dumbly.
There’s a joke in there he’d make if he could get everything in his body to stop trembling. Instead, he’s thinking about Shane and his level of attentiveness. Won’t whistle for too long in the mornings, because it might stop the birds from being able to fall in love.
”Are you trying to seduce me in bird?”
Shane shrugs, smiles like he has a secret.
“It’s kind of crazy, right?” Shane’s hands are slipping into his pockets. “Feels like the end of the world when they start flying.”
The fondness swelling up in his chest feels violent. What is Ilya going to do about him?
“Your hands are shaking,” Shane frowns. “Are you okay? I shouldn’t have made you hike this trail with bruised ribs.”
“Hollander,” Ilya’s voice comes out jagged and weak.
I just watched you talk to the fucking birds. Give me a fucking second.
“Drink water.”
Shane is dropping to his knees and slinging his bag in front of himself, unzipping the compartment to pull out a bottle of water. He looks up at Ilya and hands it to him, eyes brown and shiny, the band of the headlamp moving further up his head.
Ilya takes it, hands still trembling as he turns the lid. He tries to watch Shane as he drinks, mouthful escaping to drip down his chin. He sits down next to Shane as he hands the bottle back.
“You actually are fluent in bird,” Ilya says in disbelief.
“Um, I birdwatch. Me and my dad do,” Shane crosses his arms over his chest as he says it, smiling. “It’s good for your, um— cognition. Slows down brain aging, actually.”
Ilya’s mind jerks back to his own father, and tries to picture himself asking to watch birds together. It will be good for you papa, he says in his mind. His dad doesn’t even bother to laugh, stares back at him with cold eyes, asks why he’s so insistent on wasting time.
“There are some really nice places by Ottawa that are good for bird watching,” Shane says. “Gatineau is good for it. I could send you— yeah.”
Shane smiles the sheepish way he does.
“What, you do not think I would go?” Ilya looks at him, forcing his face to look serious.
“No,” Shane says back, honestly.
“You are right,” Ilya sighs. “I would not go.. Not alone.”
“I know,” Shane rolls his eyes, but his mouth cracks into a smile the same way the sunlight had cracked in through the branches of the trees. “Getting you out of bed is so—”
Ilya can’t bear how good Shane is, even unguarded, even out of the public eye. All square and honest, his life a systemic, organized, intentional thing. Everything he does is healthy and clean. Ilya feels like he’s been selected for something very prestigious to get to be here, sharing this with him. Drinking soda in his fortress of solitude. Sitting in his practical car. Waking up early to watch birds.
The bridge of Shane’s nose is straight and the tip of his nose is sharp. Like a beak.
“I have a bird at home,” Ilya reaches out to grab at Shane’s stomach, pinch at his sides and his shoulders and his arms, any flesh he can reach. “Is right here.”
“Ow,” Shane tries to move out of his grasp, but Ilya is too quick, too primal, too in discovery of his new element; the woods.
“What other animal sounds can you make?” Ilya is leaning in to murmur in his ear, overcome with something.
That must have been a spell that the birds cast onto him, forcing him to touch and take whatever he can. He understands them, all of their preening and dancing and bothering with all of those theatrics in the trees instead of staying in flight for most of the time. The wanting to be seen and the danger of it and the weighed risk being worth it if it catches the right ear. He feels like everything he’s ever done has been redefined. He’s thinking about the ice and the feeling of Shane’s shoulder against his own as they push into each other.
“I can kind of do a raccoon impression,” Shane says as Ilya presses his nose inside of Shane’s ear.
Raccoon impression. Offered up ernestly. Ilya feels like he’s on fire. This is getting to be a problem.
“I want to eat you right now, Shane,” Ilya mutters. “You are casting spells on me.”
“What, the raccoon impression is really doing it for you? You haven’t even heard it,” Shane says back, his hand trying very half heartedly to push Ilya away.
“Changed my mind about camping,” Ilya says as he pulls away. Let’s go. I want to see more animal impressions. Do bird call again for me.”
He’s feeling increasingly frantic in a way that takes a while for the rest of his body to catch up. Maybe one of those birds managed to slip into his ribcage and is flapping its wings with fervour in an attempt to escape.
“It confuses them,” Shane gestures towards the sky.
You need to coax out the one stuck in my chest.
“I would do this again,” Ilya tells Shane. “But with you. I would not go by myself.”
Shane is looking at him with such a gleeful amusement. Ilya must have done nothing wrong in his life if it meant it had culminated to this exact moment.
“Really?” Shane’s voice is soft.
Sweet Shane. He sees Ilya striking and shoving his way through life and wants to take him birdwatching. Earnest and capable and so loved by the Earth that it opens up and sings back to him.
“Yes,” Ilya can’t stop touching him just to touch him.
The Earth has competition. Ilya doesn’t like to lose.
When their fingers lock together again, after Shane carefully tucks his headlamp into his little backpack, the urgency in Ilya’s head to do something, anything, quiets down. They walk slower on the way down. They reach the bush that had previously caught Shane’s attention.
“Wild raspberries,” Shane tells Ilya. “Have you ever tried?”
“Poison,” Ilya says even though he knows it probably isn’t, just to rile him up.
“No,” Shane argues. “That’s not possible.”
Of course.
“You speak berry?” Ilya teases as he flicks the little space between his eyebrows that’s furrowed.
“There’s no poisonous compound berries in North America,” Shane says smugly as he picks one, like it’s something Ilya should know. “So anything that looks like a blackberry or a raspberry is safe to eat. You should know that. What if you got stranded?”
“I would hunt squirrels,” Ilya tells him as he takes the berry from Shane’s hand. “I would not eat berries like a bird.” He presses a kiss to Shane’s hairline, and then his cheek, and then his mouth, pecking. “But you are too slow to do that. So you need to know these things.”
Shane scowls as Ilya presses the berry into his cheek. “You’re making a mess!”
“Oops,” Ilya doesn’t even try to sound sorry.
He watches the flesh of the fruit break, swipes his thumb through the juice, staking his claim. Then he leans in to lick across Shane’s cheek, uses his other hand to keep him in place.
“I’m eating you,” Ilya says into the cold skin. “Very sweet.”
“Ilya,” Shane’s voice is coloured soft for him, even still.
“Sh,” Ilya tells him, holding a finger over Shane’s mouth. “You will scare the birds.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to scare the birds,” Shane says, and Ilya can hear him rolling his eyes, but he stays still.
He’s probably a little serious about not wanting to scare the birds. Ilya presses their cheeks together. It’s an odd and unpleasant sensation. It’s made better by virtue of getting to share it.
They stay there, pressed together in an awkward shape in the woods for a heartbeat, a couple of heartbeats. Somewhere overhead, a warbler sings.